Requiem for a Nun

182 WILLIAM FAULKNER

by one of the three men who were what was to be Yoknapatawpha County's

coeval pioneers and settlers, leaving in it the three oldest names-Alexander

Holston, who came as half groom and half bodyguard to Doctor Samuel

Habersham, and half nurse and half tutor to the doctor's eight-year-old

motherless son, the three of them riding horseback across Tennessee from the

Cumberland Gap along with Louis Grenier, the Huguenot younger son who

brought the first slaves into the country and was granted the first big land

patent and became the first cotton planter; while Doctor Habersham, with his

worn black bag of pills and knives and his brawny taciturn bodyguard and his

half orphan child, became the settlement itself (for a time, before it was

named, the settlement was known as Doctor Habersham's, then Habersham's,

then simply Habersham; a hundred years later, during a schism between two

ladies' clubs over the naming of the streets in order to get free mail

delivery, a movement was started, first, to change the name back to

Habersham; then, failing that, to divide the town in two and call one half

of it Habersham after the old pioneer doctor and founder)-friend of old

Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw chief (the motherless Habersham boy, now a man of

twenty-five, married one of Issetibbeha's grand-daughters and in the

thirties emigrated to Oklahoma with his wife's dispossessed people), first

unofficial, then official Chickasaw agent until he resigned in a letter of

furious denunciation addressed to the President of the United States

himself; and-his charge and pupil a man now-Alexander Holston became the

settlement's first publican, establishing the tavern still known as the

Holston House, the original log walls and puncheon floors and hand-morticed

joints of which are still buried somewhere beneath the modern pressed glass

and brick veneer and neon tubes. The lock was his;

Fifteen pounds of useless iron lugged a thousand miles through a desert of

precipice and swamp, of flood and drouth and wild beasts and wild Indians

and wilder white men, displacing that fifteen pounds better given to food or

seed to plant food or even powder to defend with, to become a fixture, a

kind of landmark, in the bar of a wilderness ordinary, locking and securing

nothing, because there was nothing behind the heavy bars and shutters

needing further locking and securing; not even a paper weight because the

only papers in the Holston House were the twisted spills in an old powder

horn above the mantel for lighting tobacco; always a little in the way,

since it had constantly to be moved: from bar to shelf to mantel back to bar

again until they finally thought about putting it on the bi-monthly

mail-pouch; familiar, known, pres-